Written when he was thirty, as a last attempt at playwriting after a string of plays failed to
garner attention from producers or directors, All
My Sons is the first of Arthur Millers’ four big plays (the others
being Death
of a Salesman, The Crucible,
and A
View from the Bridge, which were all written consecutively). In it, we
can see the seeds of what he would continue to explore in increasing depth and
nuance throughout his career. And although you could perhaps pass All My Sons off as an ‘Ibsenesque’ play,
it is in fact just as devastatingly meaty and dread-full as all his others, and
grapples with issues of morality and ethics, consequences, responsibility,
denial, guilt, and profiteering. And it seems just as relevant now as it did
almost seventy years ago.
Directed by Kip
Williams for Sydney Theatre
Company, and staged within the cavernous Roslyn Packer Theatre, All My Sons is the story of the Keller
family as they wait for their son Larry, currently Missing In Action after
WWII, to come home. But as relationships form, old unhealed wounds and barely-suppressed
secrets are torn open, and the lie under the floorboards of the Kellers’
stability and wealth is laid bare for all to see.
His is the nose
that launched a thousand quips. A famous literary swashbuckler in the same
league as Dumas’ musketeers, Cyrano de Bergerac was, incredibly, a real writer
and philosopher in France
in the early seventeenth century. Imbued with the famous proboscis and a life
much embellished beyond reality, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano
de Bergerac is a romantic swashbuckler like no other. With an uncanny
gift for words – his pen, they say, is as mighty as his sword – he is both
heroic and hopeless in the face of love, and his story is one of love – lost,
won, and unrequited, and is as humane as his nose is larger than life.
While Rostand’s
play was written in 1897, the Sydney
Theatre Company’s production uses Andrew
Upton’s adaptation from 1999 in an updated version, and is set in Cyrano’s
own mid-seventeenth century world with much flair and panache. It is the story
of Cyrano, a man who is blessed with an unfortunately large nose, and who is in
love with Roxane. Roxane is in love with Christian. Christian is in love with
Roxane but cannot express it anywhere near as adequately as he’d like. Cyrano
agrees to help him and, well, I’ll leave the rest up to you. But as lofty and
as word-drunk as the play – as Cyrano – is, there is still a sparseness, an disconnection between the period flummery in the costumes and the occasionally spare mise-en-scène (designed by Alice
Babidge with Renée
Mulder), and Upton’s adaptation.
In his writer’s
note titled, appropriately enough, ‘Grappling with Gorky,’ Andrew Upton talks about the optimism
of Russian writers. “But not blind optimism, an optimism despite the obvious
impossibility of salvation.” You can see it the work of Tolstoy, Pasternak,
Chekhov, Gorky. Not just optimism but a need to tell stories, to examine and
investigate the dynamics of human interactions and the world they find
themselves caught up in. Earlier in the year, I had the good fortune to see State Theatre Company of South
Australia’s production of The
Seagull in Adelaide,
and between that production and Sydney
Theatre Company’s Children
of the Sun, there is a precious kind of alchemy at work, a resonance in
style, a conversation between plays and ideas which is beautiful to behold.
